Thanks, Diamond!
When you mention ‘ought’, what do you really mean? How would you make a moral decision in a dilemma - say, for example, in a mother and child scenario where you have the option of intervening to save only one of the two. What decision processes would you undergo to decide what you ought to do?
How good lookin’ is the mother?
When you mention ‘ought’, what do you really mean?
I was referring to the demands the morality makes on us, and specifically, a necessary foundation or source of their authority.
When you mention ‘ought’, what do you really mean? How would you make a moral decision in a dilemma - say, for example, in a mother and child scenario where you have the option of intervening to save only one of the two. What decision processes would you undergo to decide what you ought to do?
I note in passing that moral dilemmas such as this do make for very interesting thought experiments in normative ethics but situations like this are not commonplace occurrences in one's life. I am more interested in the ontological foundation of morality because if there is no firm meta ethical foundation for morality itself then questions such as you have posed are, in the final analysis, actually meaningless. If the physical universe of matter and energy, physical objects, properties, events, and processes governed by physical laws are is all there is, then there is nothing normative about it.
If there is no such thing as a moral fact and there doesn't exist anything that is morally wrong, then literally nothing can be ruled out by arguments with only non-moral premises. So my preliminary answer to the moral dilemma you have posed is that on a naturalistic basis where only physical forces are at work it wouldn't make any difference whether you save the mother or the child, or do nothing, or deliberately kill one of them or both of them. There wouldn't be anything wrong with killing one of two persons where otherwise both would live, like an abortionist, or even killing both of them just for the fun of it, like Ted Bundy.
Is There an Evolutionary Foundation for Human Morality?
Cordially,